As photonics becomes more widely used in communications equipment, the performance characteristics of optoelectronic circuit elements must be improved. There are several prior art optical receiver circuit designs in existence. Such circuits receive optical input beams and generate output signals which take the form of either electrical signals or regenerated optical signals.
One prior art design is an optoelectric receiver circuit which is a field-effect transistor (FET) implementation of a high impedance receiver. Another prior art approach involves utilizing an FET implementation of a transimpedance receiver. Both the high input impedance receiver and the transimpedance receiver have some serious disadvantages. For example, when single light beams are used, a resistor is often employed in these prior art receivers, and this resistor fixes the bandwidth of the receiver. Further, because there is always some static current flow through the FETs of these receiver designs, electrical energy is dissipated or wasted. Yet further, since only one input beam is used, the power level of that beam must be of sufficient intensity so that the receiver can distinguish between logic states. In addition, a passive pull-up load causes a slow down in output switching.